Keanu Reeves’s hitman franchise is blossoming into a delirious little earner. This third instalment reunites the star with director Chad Stahelski – who used to be Keanu’s stunt double in the Matrix films – and screenwriter Derek Kolstad, and keeps the action cranked to melting point for its two-hours-plus running time.

It’s not often that music of this kind gets a release outside of Morocco, and Arc Music and the producer/musicians must be applauded for curating such an intense, inside view on the ecstatic release of Sufi music across the kingdom, often drawn from a simple street or domestic setting.

Essaouira, on Morocco’s Atlantic coast, is the place of winds. Day or night, hot or cold, year in, year out, the “Alizee” blows, and it blows. In the local folklore it is not from the ocean but a grumbling resident of the medina – perhaps protesting the town’s rapid recent expansion, its port’s modernisation and the loss of legendary Chez Sam, the restaurant once beloved by an Othello-filming Orson Welles.

The eel is dying. Its body flits through a series of complicated knots which become increasingly grotesque torques. Immersed in a pool of brine — concentrated salt water five times denser than seawater — it is succumbing to toxic shock. As biomatter on the sea floor of the Gulf of Mexico decomposes, brine and methane are produced, and where these saline pockets collect, nothing grows. Dead creatures drop into it; live creatures that linger in it die.

Tamikrest’s fourth album is well-presented, good enough, but a little hamstrung by what have become the clichés of the modern Touareg genre: the lilting rhythms of a camel cruising slowly across the dunes, intertwined guitars that smoothly swirl bewteen old Tamashek melodies and gentle riffs that might have come from the Deep South.

You must remember this. It’s December 1941, the month of Pearl Harbour. Richard Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), an American, probably a Communist, who fought Franco in Spain and ran guns to Ethiopia when Mussolini invaded, has given up the fight against fascism and become the proprietor of Rick’s Café Américain, a casino-nightclub in Casablanca, in unoccupied French Morocco.

While it makes for a moderately amusing evening out, this World War Two espionage-romance caper doesn't stand up to a lot of scrutiny (I'm trying to work out where they managed to find the "Best Film of the Year!" quote used in the TV ad). Stars Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard will guarantee some ticket-shifting action, but the apparent intention of director Robert Zemeckis and screenwriter Steven Peaky Blinders Knight to recreate Hollywood's vintage wartime melodramas never quite comes off.

Still, it's quite fun to see them trying. The opening scene is a shot of sun-scorched desert sands carrying the caption "French Morocco, 1942", and into the top of the frame descends a pair of boots belonging to Canadian agent Max Vatan (Pitt), as he arrives by parachute. He's heading to – where else? – Casablanca to meet French Resistance veteran Marianne Beauséjour (that would be Ms Cotillard). She has inveigled her way into the local beau monde, where she rubs shoulders in the treacherous Vichy air with both French and Germans. Brad, posing as a phosphate engineer, purports to have come from Paris to reunite with his fictional wife.

Of course, they're really on an assassination mission, though there's some time to soak up the sultry North African night and hang out at the updated version of Rick's cafe. Marianne isn't too happy about Max's Parisian accent though, which is fair enough because Brad's mumbling French is little better than his music-hall Italian in Inglourious Basterds (and how Allied could do with some of the latter's deranged inventiveness and ferocious black humour!).Nonetheless the Casablanca job is doubly successful, since the couple not only zap their target but also fall in love (they seal the deal in the back seat of a car, as it rocks in a tempestuous sandstorm). Suddenly it's a year later, and Max and Marianne are happily married and living in Hampstead, NW3. Mysteriously detached from the war, they're enjoying a riotous life, with their gaggle of bohemian, cocaine-snorting (really, in 1943?) friends. Their cup of happiness runneth over when Marianne gives birth to their daughter while being frantically wheeled around on a hospital bed in the middle of a spectacular CGI air raid.

But just when it was all going so well, a bitter chill blows through in the shape of a baleful senior SOE officer (Simon McBurney). He describes himself as a "rat-catcher", and he has reason to believe that there's a Nazi informer operating in the immediate vicinity (I'm doing my no-spoilers best here, though I can reveal that Anton Lesser's shifty Hampstead jeweller needs to be carefully watched). Max refuses to believe it, but the mole must be caught and Max goes into spy-hunting overdrive, even hijacking an RAF plane and taking a wildly improbable awayday to occupied France to quiz a possible witness who's languishing in a French prison. There's also a macabre walk-on by a barely recognisable Matthew Goode, gothically disfigured in aerial combat. 

If only Marianne had played "La Marseillaise" to Max, everything could have been so very different. As it is, Cotillard's ability to suggest latent melancholy and a secret inner life allows her to march imperiously off with most of the acting plaudits, while Brad was probably better suited to that tank-commander's job in Fury. The Royal Navy next time, perhaps?

• Read more film reviews on theartsdesk

BRAD PITT’S BIG MOMENTS

Fury. David Ayer and Brad Pitt take the war film by the scruff of the neck

Inglorious Basterds. Pitt is gloriously absurd in Tarantino WW2 alternative history

Killing Them Softly. Brad Pitt cleans up an almighty mess in Andrew Dominik’s high-calibre crime ensemble

Moneyball. How Billy Beane created a revolution in Major League baseball

The Big Short. Pitt’s on the money as director Adam McKay successfully makes a drama out of a crisis

The Counsellor. Ridley Scott ensemble thriller is nasty, brutish and short or mysterious, upsetting and alluring

The Tree of Life. Terrence Malick’s elliptical epic leads us through time, space and one family’s story

PLUS ONE TURKEY

World War Z. It's World War with a Zee as Brad Pitt battles the undead and a zombie script

@SweetingAdam

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Allied

A couple of years ago I saw an extraordinary outdoor concert where a rapper called Muslim (great name if you want to be hard to find on Google) performed at the Timitar Festival in Agadir in the South of Morocco to 80,000 delirious fans. The song which everyone knew was “Al Rissala" (The Letter) which called out corruption and ignorance in high places. The Festival acts as a kind of safety valve for dissent.

John Le Carré made it quite clear what he thinks of the new world order in The Night Manager. All together now: a nexus of corrupt money and sinister establishment interests make for cynical realpolitik. It’s a persuasive weltanschauung that plays well to millennials priced out of their own future by ungovernable global forces beyond the reproof of electorates. But the message can become a bit of a stuck record. Take Our Kind of Traitor.

It’s being sold as the ideal ballet for first-timers, but I would blush to introduce even my neighbour’s cat to this Carry On Up the Harem hokum. Worse, its silliness verges on offensive. When, in Rudolph Nureyev’s 1990s production of La Bayadère for Paris Opera Ballet, a chorus of blacked-up picaninnies appeared for about three minutes, you blinked and put it down to an unwise attempt at historical accuracy.